About the project
Our organization is dedicated to driving the Fab City movement in Québec, Canada. We have established ourselves in a symbolic neighborhood within the manufacturing sector in the heart of Montréal to prototype the Fab City concept. The initiative we are presenting has evolved through three phases.
(1) We demonstrated the potential of our Fab Lab, called “échofab,” to meet community needs through open-source distributed manufacturing of 35,000 face shields at the beginning of the pandemic. This experience led us to deeply connect with the community.
(2) In anticipation of the Fab City Summit in Montréal, we conceived a signature Montréal project called “Remix Your Chair.” The idea was to take old, broken, or unloved chairs and transform them into functional chairs with a new aesthetic. The targeted creativity lay in using completely different pieces from the original missing parts, allowing visual artists, designers, and invited makers to unleash their imagination. These chairs were also intended to be auctioned off during the Fab City Campus event. This initiative revitalized the community’s efforts in chair collection, and as a result, one of the auction’s goals was to create a public bench.
(3) This open-source prototype project continued and led to distributed manufacturing by local stakeholders and the use of materials from an industrial symbiosis to create public benches that will be installed in the neighborhood.
